When Netflix released the 4th season of popular series House of Cards, it has turned into a bitter disappointment for residents of many countries. Because of "legacy" licensing agreements, the streaming service can’t show its own original programming in part of the European countries, including Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Turkey. Subscribers in Hong Kong and Africa will be unable to watch the series and have to turn to pirate sources. Moreover, in some countries House of Cards isn’t available at all.

Generally, the movie industry uses geographical licensing deals to sell movie and TV-show rights in order to separate parties in various countries. But Netflix wants to do things differently, aiming to make as much content available globally as it can. With this purpose, it is developing several movies and TV-shows in-house in order to bypass geographical copyright restrictions for its own original programming. However, the issue wasn’t eliminated: when the service released the latest season of House of Cards a few days ago, Netflix subscribers in dozens of countries found out to be unable to watch it yet.

Netflix explained that it didn’t have global licenses for House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black. As for the latter series, it is entirely absent from Netflix in more than fifty countries. This situation is very disappointing for subscribers, since Netflix has repeatedly called on the entertainment industry to offer its content globally without any barriers, but somehow failed to do this for all of its own content yet.

Netflix CEO said that the licensing issues were a legacy from the last 7 or 8 years, and they hope to get rid of it in the near future.

At this stage of the game, TV / Movie / Music execs are denying themselves revenue. We, for a while now, live in a world with high speed high capacity internet, and if they don't show us what we want *when* we want it, we will find other avenues to get it.

Netflix users, for example, are happy to pay for the shows, but are no longer going to wait on outdated business models such as 'regions'. If it is available anywhere ion the world it had better be available everywhere in the world else it will be found for free elsewhere.

Same scenario if you try and charge more in one country *cough* Australia, than in other countries (exchange rate aside), you try and rip people off, you are basically saying bye bye to the revenue you would have otherwise have brought in.